Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

60Owen Perina, The Nautilus Sky: Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 1956).

61In 1993, a much-debated book speculated that not only was Tallent perfectly aware of Norton’s theft, but he was aware as well that ingestion of the opa’ivu’eke led both to a superannuated lifespan and to a highly compromised one. In Nowhere Is an Island: The Man Who Was Paul Tallent (New York: Faber and Faber), Henry Gombrecht, an American studies professor at Williams, claims that Tallent never announced his findings for fear that the island would be overrun with fortune hunters and scientists. He further claims that once Tallent figured out that Norton had come to the same conclusion, he and Esme plotted to kill him or abandon him on Ivu’ivu, but that Tallent lost his nerve shortly before the deed was to be done. Gombrecht also claims that Tallent’s eventual disappearance was a sort of self-inflicted penance for what he considered his role in the destruction of the island, though in a curious bit of scholarly circumspection, he stops short of speculating whether Tallent killed himself (as many believe) or simply vanished into some small unreachable part of the world.

As efficient and yet dramatic as Gombrecht’s theory is, it is very difficult to see where he might have found proof for any of it, given that none of Tallent’s personal writings have ever been located. Gombrecht, though (who if nothing else proved himself tenacious in the face of the controversies that erupted after the book’s publication), claims to have pages from Tallent’s first Ivu’ivu journals that an unnamed source gave to him. However, considering the facts that (1) he has refused to have the papers authenticated, or even to show them to any of his colleagues, and (2) the people who would have had the most ready access to pages from that diary would have been Esme Duff — who died in 1982, when Gombrecht was still in graduate school and unlikely to have cause to be introduced to her — and Norton himself, who would surely have volunteered them to a much more respectable and trustworthy academic source had they existed, it is difficult to believe, much less confirm, the veracity of his statements.

62This remains one of the lasting mysteries of Paul Tallent’s unusually mysterious life. Numerous theories have been postulated, but the two most enduring (if not the most credible) are that Tallent performed sexual favors for the king and that he somehow managed to convince the king that he was a god. The evidence for the former theory is as follows: the king was known for being, in modern terms, bisexual; although he had numerous wives, he also had numerous male lovers. His wives all hewed fairly strictly to the traditional ideal of U’ivuan female beauty — stocky and heavy-hipped, with round, slightly bulging eyes and very black hair — but he was known for being much more catholic in his tastes when it came to his male companions, even going so far as to actively seek out men of diverse appearance (a challenging quest on monoracial U’ivu). A 1986 book by Harriet Maxwell, one of the second-generation anthropologists to study U’ivu, suggests that during his first trip to the islands, in 1947, Tallent became for a brief but potent period the king’s primary lover, a sort of treasured oddity in His Highness’s collection (it is not known whether Tallent was a practicing homosexual in his daily life, although even if he was, the story, if true, says a great deal about his ambition and determination). Their sexual relationship was not long-lived — although Maxwell posits that Tallent was thereafter compelled to perform sexually for the king on each of his subsequent visits — but he apparently won the king’s favor and for many years was the only Westerner allowed unrestricted access to Ivu’ivu.

Eventually, however, Tallent lost his sole rights to the island, in part, Maxwell suggests, because of the very miscalculation that Norton recounts: in the end, it turned out that the king could be tempted. Not with money — Tallent was right about that — but with things: the pharmaceutical companies and explorers and various hangers-on that followed were able to purchase access to the island with gifts of planes, boats, refrigerators and other appliances (although electricity was not widely, much less regularly, available on the islands until 1972), and much cheaper flotsam as well. The U’ivu National Museum in Tavaka is full of glass cases of these embarrassing relics — cigarette lighters and record players and cigars and wheeled suitcases, all gifts from scientists and scholars hoping to convince the king to give them access to the wonders of Ivu’ivu. (The most upsetting and cynical gift in the king’s collection is a book whose jacket bears an image of the king and the title His Royal Highness Tui’mai’ele [sic]: The Great King of U’ivu . The book is actually a biography of Abraham Lincoln that has been rejacketed. But the king would not have been able to read English, and it is likely that he would have been flattered, and marveled at how far his renown had spread. The gift is credited to “an American scientist from New York, USA, 1964,” by which point pharmaceutical companies were swarming throughout Ivu’ivu on the hunt for the opa’ivu’eke.) ( The Disappearing Island: The Mysterious Life of Paul Tallent ).

The second theory, that Tallent convinced the king that he was a god, comes courtesy of another second-generation U’ivuan scholar, Antony Flaglon. In a 1990 paper for the Annals of Anthropology , Flaglon relates a tale supposedly told to him by one of the king’s adviser’s sons, who claims that his father saw Tallent “leaning over His Highness and ‘chanting in a deep and sonorous voice’ while His Highness lay back against his cushions, mouth open with enchantment.” Aside from the use of the word sonorous (which seems not at all the sort of language an illiterate U’ivuan might employ, the king’s adviser or no), there are reasons to be suspicious of this tale. For one — as Flaglon notes — Tallent was raised in a Catholic orphanage, and it is most likely that he was performing some liturgical chants for the king’s amusement, with no apparent aim of bewitchment. For another, there is of course no such thing as bewitchment. More importantly, Flaglon was apparently unable to find any other of the king’s intimates, including his children and other members of the court, to confirm the adviser’s son’s statement ( Annals of Anthropology , vol. 48, no. 570, 134–43). (Interestingly, Flaglon’s paper inspired a new round of advocacy for the first theory, with yet another of the second-generation scholars — this one a professor at McGill named Horace Grey Hosmer — speculating that what the adviser actually saw was Tallent seducing the king as a prelude to beginning some sort of ecstatic sexual orgy [“Far from U’ivu, a Mysterious Life Gets Reexamined Once Again,” New York Times , March 27, 1991].)

63Fa’a was the third son in a well-respected clan of wild boar hunters who were known throughout Tavaka for their generosity and bravery. But so strong was the U’ivuans’ distrust of Ivu’ivu that his extended journey there — in the company of three ho’oalas, no less — greatly damaged his and his family’s reputation. When it was revealed that he had died on the island, his family (although not, significantly, his wife) denounced and later disowned him. Norton later told me that he heard whisperings among the Tavakans about Fa’a’s suspected fate: that he had been eaten by the Ivu’ivuans (a persistent fable), that he had become one of them, and, most damningly, that he had become the very thing that he had gone to search for, that not-human, not-beast hybrid that roved the island still — a mo’o kua’au.